2015 AIGA Medalist: Paola Antonelli

Her arrival at MoMA was perfectly timed with the technology and communications explosion. Of the 18 or so design exhibitions she’s mounted since the mid-1990s, most have responded to the dynamic cultural and technological revolutions of our age; changes that curators of more codified disciplines have been slower to accept.

With her landmark 2008 exhibition, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” Antonelli was all in. The show anointed designers as translators and humanizers of complexity, the interface between momentous change and the possibility of embracing progress. The architecture critic for the New York Times wrote: “As revolutionary in its own way as MoMA’s ‘Machine Art’ exhibition of 1934, which introduced Modern design to a generation of Americans, the exhibition is packed with individual works of sublime beauty. Like that earlier show, it is shaped by an unwavering faith in the transformative powers of technology.”

One of Antonelli’s boldest moves was to acquire the @ symbol for the permanent collection in 2010. The mark is documented to have been in use since 1536 and is theorized to have originated as a shortcut in Latin for “toward,” or in French for “at,” but by the 20th century it sat unused on most keyboards. When computer scientist Ray Tomlinson helped create the first email system in 1971, he put it to use as an address routing device.

The acquisition was mystifying to some, and raised the issue of what it means to collect something that’s not a physical object. But that was precisely the point: design is everywhere, not just in items to be purchased or consumed. Antonelli explained the concept with a rationale that all designers of anonymous unsung solutions could love:

“Tomlinson performed a powerful act of design that not only forever changed the @ sign's significance and function, but which also has become an important part of our identity in relationship and communication with others. His (unintended) role as a designer must be acknowledged and celebrated by the one collection—MoMA’s—that has always celebrated elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time, the essence of modern.”

After the @ acquisition positioned Antonelli as avant-garde, collecting 14 video games a few years later cemented her pioneering stature. “I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression,” she told an audience at a TED Conference. “I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life.”

If design has spread like gas, Antonelli herself has travelled nearly as far. From the World Economic Forum to conferences around the globe, she’s addressed diverse audiences with the message of design’s transformative power. On Twitter, her handle is @curiousoctopus, and she’s often seen wearing a small octopus amulet, telegraphing her quest to extend her understanding and her reach.

At a time when human knowledge doubles every two years and technological impact continues to accelerate, Antonelli is a design curator for our age. She sees the paradigm shifts before they occur, and celebrates designers as they make necessities functional, if not beautiful.